


'tis the damn season

by sk4di



Category: Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, F/F, Marriage Proposal, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, covid-19 and all, hey yall happy holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:15:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28330737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sk4di/pseuds/sk4di
Summary: How Christmas came to mean something to Debbie
Relationships: Lou Miller/Debbie Ocean
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	'tis the damn season

**Author's Note:**

> I'm late I guess but hi!! happy holidays!!!

Oceans don't do Christmas, they're Jewish. Or kind of.

Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Jesus - or something pagan that came before that. Debbie doesn't know for sure, she couldn't care less. 

For her, Christmas only exists because of Lou. No, that's half a lie, because Christmas only started because of Tess, to be honest.

Danny married a goyish girl and it was all the entire clan Ocean talked for a good while. They expected Tess to convert, she didn't. Then they expected Danny to find himself another girl and he didn't. Danny was never one to do what people told him to and Debbie loved him for that - when she wasn't the one ordering him.

The funny thing was that Oceans didn't even care that much about religion or tradition. Their Jewish holidays were always a mess of drunk gambling and boasting about jobs. So, no one really cared about Danny marrying out of the religion, they just loved the fuss of it all: the golden boy was straying.

Because Tess was a good girl from a good family with a good degree with good intentions. Danny was going to have to choose between being a good man to her or to his clan. Being both was undoable.

Danny seemed so commited to the first option that when December came, Debbie found herself attending a Christmas Eve party Tess Ocean threw at their New York apartment. There wasn't much to do and she was there for Danny, whom looked out of place for the first time ever among those friends of his new wife and the whole Christmas set up. No, he mingled well, he made their guests laugh, he charmed them into him, but Debbie knew better. They never had a Christmas tree before, those songs didn't mean a thing to them. She gave him a soft smile across the room as he kissed Tess under the mistletoe.

Next year, the event repeated itself and so did on the next one. Danny adapted, Debbie too - the food was nice and she didn't mind spending time with her brother and sister-in-law. The whole set up still didn't mean much beyond what any other party offered her: food, alcohol and flirting with a guy she was going to leave in the morning wondering where did the girl and his watch go.

Until Lou came in.

God, Lou was a fucking mess back then. She was an Australian orphan with the small amount of heritance left to her all wasted in her college education as her mother had wished, a buzzcut - a fucking Sinead O'Connor buzzcut - and using every penny she got to get into med school, pay for the shared crappy apartment and managing to not starve. She worked everywhere they accepted her and took whatever job Tammy handed her, until Tammy landed her on Debbie's hands and the rest is history.

"Aren't you Jewish?" She asked at the end of 1993, when Debbie invited her to Tess and Danny's Christmas Eve party in one of Lou's overnight shifts at the grocery store.

Truth be told, by then, she was already a little too fond of the misfit she had been working with for a few months. Between jobs, more than once she woke up to an asleep Lou on her couch, all limbs and pointy ears, then sharing a quiet breakfast with her, telling her to shut the fuck up whenever she told her to discount the bageks from her next cut. Or times when they met randomly in poker tables and parties, somehow managing to stick together until the sun came up, counting the dollars from the wallets they picked and laughing over the family pictures they found inside them. There were also the times like those, when Debbie appeared by the grocery store Lou worked at overnight and just sat with her while she replaced the shelves, talking and listening and scheming and learning about her.

Back then, Lou wouldn't shut up. She talked and talked until she ran out of words and had to start another conversation. Nowadats anyone like that would annoy the hell out of Debbie, but at the time she got addicted to the big words and random science facts falling in between her tales.

Lou was...different. Lou was the one she didn't understand from the moment their first met. Lou was the puzzle she was determined to solve but slowly, because it was so much fun to patch the pieces of leather jackets and snippets of stories about running away from foster homes together.

"My brother married a Christian girl," Debbie said. "I thought you'd like some...eggnog."

Eggnog is the one thing that stood out to her among the stories involving Lou's mother and Christmas to her. Winnie used to make eggnog for their Christmas dinner and Lou described it as "drinking magic". Eggnog was fucking awful, Debbie couldn't understand how anyone could voluntarily drink it. But the way Lou smiled at the memory, made her want to give it to her. 

"You don't have to pity the poor orphan, Ocean," Lou said, replacing cereal boxes on a shelve.

"It's not pity," Debbie said, sitting on a portable stairs. "I just think you'd have fun." She took a bite of the apple she wasn't going to pay for. "I would have fun," she said.

Lou looked at her and they shared a smile until Debbie glanced away, not knowing why she suddenly felt shy.

"Alright," Lou said. "What should I wear?"

By then, Danny and Tess had moved to a better address, even if Tess didn't understand how they could pay for it. It was bigger and with a better view, Debbie liked it very much. But when Lou walked in, she decided she liked the sight of the blonde in a velvet black suit - that she certainly got from a thrift store - more.

Lou enchanted them all, of course. Danny and Tess and Rusty and everyone else. She smiled and joked and danced. She drank the eggnog and dined, smiling dazzlingly at Tess as she complimented the food.

"They like you," Debbie said, with a smile when they sat together in a corner after dinner.

"Do they?" Lou asked, looking actually clueless about the effect she had on the people she just met. The memory of this always makes Debbie nostalgic over how precious that specif version of Lou was.

Debbie nodded. Maybe was the wine, maybe was jealousy. "But I like you more."

Lou was so close as she held her stare. A warm hand came to rest on Debbie's and it felt like that stupid thing Lou used to say about eggnog, "drinking magic" or something. She ignored it at the time and so many other times after, but even back then she knew she finally liked Christmas.

She ended up kissing Lou a week later on New Year's day as midnight came and what it was meant to be a friendly peck became kiss with one pair of hands on a waist and another tangled in short blonde hair. That became running away to Debbie's place, Lou's mouth all over her, short black dress falling onto the floor, laboring breaths and something like love on the tip of her fingers as she traced the freckles on Lou's bare back as the sun came up.

It was the beginning of forever, but they were too young to know that.

* * *

Google offered three thousand results for "eggnog recipe easy". She could call Tess but she wasn't sure her recipe was easy or if she actually could call her - she made mental note to call her next day to wish a merry christmas.

She managed to put it together and it tasted like shit - as always. She hoped that to Lou it tasted, if not like "drinking magic", like drinking normal eggnog.

It had been a hard year for everyone. There was some tiny virus out there killing people and keeping everyone inside their homes - if they still could pay for one. Everyone had to use masks and sanitize their hands all the time. There weren't enough going on out there for them; not enough money, not enough people, not enough events.

Lou's club was closed for indeterminate time and it was endearing how much she loved and missed that place. She kept it even after she needed to, after the millions. She kept caring for and upgrading it, paying the employees a little over she should even during the pandemy - what Debbie knew was directly linked to her youth and the underpaid jobs she went through. With the club closed, Lou was home much more than she wanted.

That way, 2020 was laying together on the couch waiting for one of them to get tired of the feeling of their bodies against each other - it lasted hours. It was FaceTiming their friends and making plans for a future they could only hope upon on. It was kissing each other goodnight leaning against the bathroom sink, knowing that the morning would bring another day on their own. It was knowing to respect each other's space, allowing the other to be by themselves, using the large space of their loft in their favor. It was leaning over the couch to place a kiss on the bridge of a nose while the other was reading or going through their phones. It was ordering food and spending more time sanitizing the containers than actually eating it. It was making love in the morning without any hurry to go on with their days. It was not stealing because they got everything they needed from the internet. It was donating crazy amounts of money, expecting it would change some of the chaos they received in the news. It was feeling lucky for just being together, for being alive.

So, when Christmas Eve came, Debbie just wanted one thing to be in place. If they couldn't have their friends over, at least Lou was going to have her eggnog.

"What are you doing?" Lou asked as she woke up from a nap and found Debbie in a long flowing champagne dress, brushing her hair in front of the mirror by the bedroom.

"Getting dressed for dinner," Debbie answered, looking briefly over her shoulder.

"Dinner?" Lou corked an eyebrow.

Debbie sighed, but she had an amused smirk. "Are you really making a Jewish person say aloud that she made Christmas eve dinner?"

Lou smirked back. "Made?"

Debbie rolled her eyes. "Bought it." She swapped her long hair over one shoulder. "I made the eggnog, though." She looked up to stare at Lou through the mirror.

She was sitting on the bed, blonde hair tucked behind her ears, just in an old Eagles t-shirt and underwear.

"Come here," Lou said, extending a hand in Debbie's direction. "What did I do to deserve a wife like you, honey?"

She crossed the room and crawled over the sheets until she was in the space between Lou's legs. She leaned in and licked her lower lip before kissing her. "You wish."

"I do," Lou said, her voice dragged with something like sleep and infatuation. She kissed her lips then nosed her cheek until her mouth found the spot underneath her ear. At the same time, her hands ran through Debbie's arms until they hand intertwined, feeling the ringless soft fingers between hers.

Debbie pulled back a few inches to stare at Lou. Her beautiful foreign. Her best friend. Her best laid plan.

There was always something about the way Lou looked at her. She was used to being looked at. She had her share of older men whom she took advantage of and younger men who took advantage of her and everything else in between. She knew the power she had over them. Lou, though, was the only glance she cared to have on her. 

When Lou looked at her, the world stopped. When Lou looked at her, she wasn't anything but hers. When Lou looked at her, she was clean of any crimes and sins. When Lou looked at her, there was only love. She would do anything for Lou to keep looking at her just like that. Close, quietly, exclusively.

She brushed their noses together. "Come on, let's get downstairs," Debbie said. She pecked her lips one more time. "I'll get the eggnog for you."

Lou got downstairs in a pair of black trousers and a emerald satin shirt and -following Debbie's suit - barefoot. She found their main floor subtly decorated for Christmas, with a few strings of lights and table decorations in red and green that weren't there before.

They dined the ordered food with a playlist of Christmas jazz in the background, the candles lighting up Lou's face, making her look like an angel.

"What?" She asked, sipping the eggnog that she swears it feels like drinking magic but Debbie is sure she is just being the kind soul she was raised to be.

"You are Christmas to me," Debbie said in the same beat.

Lou smiled and rolled her eyes.

"You dazzled my brother," Debbie said, batting her eyelashes. "You told me all those stories about Winnie. You touched my hand." She reached and took Lou's pale fingers between hers. "And suddenly Christmas was a thing."

So Lou leaned in over the table and kissed her, hands on the side of her neck, mouth warm, tasting like eggnog and Debbie suddenly didn't mind at all. "I love you."

Debbie nodded, brushing her lips against hers. She kissed her upper lip. It was time. "I need you to listen to me now."

Lou pulled back slightly, still cupping her face, a small frown appearing between her light eyebrows.

Debbie pulled her chair closer to Lou, until they were facing each other. She laid her palms on the top of the blonde's thighs and ran them up and down.

"I wouldn't do it in any other circumstances," she started. "This was such an year and all this time locked in here gets me thinking don't think two people have been more right to do this then we are right now - unusual, I know, since we're wrong to pretty much everything. This damn year, Lou."

Lou had dropped her hands from her face to hold Debbie's, whom turned her palms up, allowing Lou to intertwine their fingers.

She smiled as she looked into blue eyes, a new color blue in them as the candles flicked. "I've loved you from the first time you held my hand, it was Christmas. I didn't know it was love. I didn't know that for a long long while." She rolled her eyes and looked down at their joined hands. "But now I know." She looked up.

Lou blinked, half confused, half worried. "Debbie-"

"I gotta ask you something," Debbie said. One of her hands let go of Lou's and fumbled with the Christmas decorated nap near her empty plate until she found the ring.

Amita sent her that one, of course. It was from past century, older than any of them. The band was golden, with delicated branches sculpted on it and a single sapphire on the center.

"It's not a diamond, you see," Debbie said, feeling as shy as when she admitted she would have fun if Lou attended that party all those years ago. 

Lou was staring at her the whole time, tears pooling inside her eyes and a soft smile in her lips.

Debbie looked down briefly before looking up. "If something like soulmates or the love of a life exists, you are all that to me - and more. You are everything those people can't put in words because they don't have the pleasure of being loved by you." She shook her head and smiled, feeling a couple of tears roll down her face as she did.

Lou, shedding tears of her own herself, thumbed away Debbies tears with a smile.

Debbie sighed. "Christmas was just the beginning of everything you changed for me." She held up the ring and held Lou's gaze. "Lou, will you marry me?"

Lous shook her head with a smile. "This damn year made you soft."

Debbie sniffled. "For God's sakes, Lou, just answer it already, it's very hard to propose to you have no i-"

Lou interrupted her with a deep kiss, pulling her up from her sit and wrapping her arms around her. She broke the kiss to look into her face, Debbie's brown eyes searching for hers. "Of course I will." Lou smiled and Debbie smiled. "Honey, it shouldn't even be a question."

Debbie bit her lip. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," she said and kissed her again.

The brunette pulled Lou's left hand up delicately, sliding the ring on her finger and placing a soft kiss on top of it, before kissing her knuckles and the palm of her hand. "I love you. I really do. You have no idea. No one does."

Lou pulled her into a hug, kissing the side of her neck and smelling her in.

"Merry Christmas, baby," Debbie said pulling back and resting their foreheads together.

Lou laughed, kissing the side of her nose. "The merriest of all." She kissed her again, softly at the beginning but by the time they pulled back, Debbie's hands were in her waistband. "Wait, will I have to convert?" Lou asked with a smirk.

Debbie rolled her eyes and kissed her fiancee, again and again, swallowing her smirk in, getting drunk on drinking magic.


End file.
